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.\"     Title: tesseract
.\"    Author: [FIXME: author] [see http://docbook.sf.net/el/author]
.\" Generator: DocBook XSL Stylesheets v1.75.2 <http://docbook.sf.net/>
.\"      Date: 09/30/2010
.\"    Manual: \ \&
.\"    Source: \ \&
.\"  Language: English
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.TH "TESSERACT" "1" "09/30/2010" "\ \&" "\ \&"
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.SH "NAME"
tesseract \- command\-line OCR engine
.SH "SYNOPSIS"
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\fBtesseract\fR \fIimagename\fR \fItextbase\fR [\fIconfigfile\fR] [\fI\-l lang\fR]
.SH "DESCRIPTION"
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tesseract(1) is a commercial quality OCR engine originally developed at HP between 1985 and 1995\&. In 1995, this engine was among the top 3 evaluated by UNLV\&. It was open\-sourced by HP and UNLV in 2005, and has been developed by Google since then\&.
.SH "OPTIONS"
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\fIimagename\fR The name of the input image
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\fItextbase\fR The basename of the output file (to which the appropriate extension will be appended)
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\fIconfigfile\fR The config to use\&. A config is a plaintext file which contains a list of variables and their values, one per line, with a space separating variable from value\&.
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\fI\-l lang\fR The language to use\&. If none is specified, English is assumed\&. Tesseract uses 3\-character ISO 639\-2 language codes\&. (See LANGUAGES)
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\fI\-v\fR Returns the current version of the tesseract(1) executable\&.
.SH "LANGUAGES"
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There are currently language packs available for the following languages:
.TS
tab(:);
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bul
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Bulgarian
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cat
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Catalan
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ces
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Czech
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chi_sim
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Simplified Chinese
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chi_tra
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Traditional Chinese
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dan
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Danish
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dan\-frak
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Danish (Fraktur)
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deu
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German
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ell
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Greek
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eng
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English
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fin
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Finnish
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fra
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French
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hun
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Hungarian
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ind
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Indonesian
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ita
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Italian
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jpn
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Japanese
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kor
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Korean
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lav
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Latvian
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lit
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Lithuanian
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nld
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Dutch
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nor
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Norwegian
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pol
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Polish
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por
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Portuguese
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ron
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Romanian
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rus
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Russian
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slk
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Slovakian
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slv
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Slovenian
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spa
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Spanish
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srp
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Serbian
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swe
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Swedish
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tgl
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Tagalog
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tha
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Thai
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tur
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Turkish
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ukr
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Ukrainian
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vie
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Vietnamese
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.TE
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.SH "HISTORY"
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The engine was developed at Hewlett Packard Laboratories Bristol and at Hewlett Packard Co, Greeley Colorado between 1985 and 1994, with some more changes made in 1996 to port to Windows, and some C++izing in 1998\&. A lot of the code was written in C, and then some more was written in C++\&. Since then all the code has been converted to at least compile with a C++ compiler\&. Currently it builds under Linux with gcc4\&.0, gcc4\&.1 and under Windows with VC++6 and VC++Express\&. The C++ code makes heavy use of a list system using macros\&. This predates stl, was portable before stl, and is more efficient than stl lists, but has the big negative that if you do get a segmentation violation, it is hard to debug\&. Another "feature" of the C/C++ split is that the C++ data structures get converted to C data structures to call the low\-level C code\&. This is ugly, and the C++izing of the C code is a step towards eliminating the conversion, but it has not happened yet\&.
.sp
The most important changes in version 2\&.00 were that Tesseract can now recognize 6 languages, is fully UTF8 capable, and is fully trainable\&. See \m[blue]\fBhttp://code\&.google\&.com/p/tesseract\-ocr/wiki/TrainingTesseract\fR\m[] for more information on training\&.
.sp
Tesseract was included in UNLV\(cqs Fourth Annual Test of OCR Accuracy\&. See \m[blue]\fBhttp://www\&.isri\&.unlv\&.edu/downloads/AT\-1995\&.pdf\fR\m[]\&. With Tesseract 2\&.00, scripts are now included to allow anyone to reproduce some of these tests\&. See \m[blue]\fBhttp://code\&.google\&.com/p/tesseract\-ocr/wiki/TestingTesseract\fR\m[] for more details\&.
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Tesseract 3\&.00 adds a number of new languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean\&. It also introduces a new, single\-file based system of managing language data\&. For further details, see the file ReleaseNotes included with the distribution\&.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
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tesseract(1)
.SH "COPYING"
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Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2\&.0
